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Leveraging SPARK and Ada in Cutting-Edge Auto Systems

NVIDIA has been involved in the design of advanced automotive systems since these platforms required higher levels of compute performance, especially with the incorporation of machine learning (ML) into these solutions. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced a collaboration with Mercedes-Benz at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show(Fig. 1).

1. Mercedes-Benz Executive Vice President Sajjad Khan (left) and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang (right) highlight their plans for next-generation AI cars and the new breed of mobility solutions.

High reliability and safety-related systems require corresponding software support. One area that requires this type of support is avionics. Avionics systems generally need a significant amount of software, but self-driving cars and advanced automotive systems will actually have a larger amount of software to handle equally critical safety and reliability concerns.

Shri notes, “As this software becomes more complex, there’s a greater chance for human error, opening up more potential for security and safety risks.

“To ensure that this vital software is secure, NVIDIA is working with AdaCore, a development and verification tool provider for safety- and security-critical software. By implementing the Ada and SPARK programming languages into certain firmware elements, we can reduce the potential for human error.”

“Self-driving cars are complex and require sophisticated software exceeding the most rigorous standards out there,” said Daniel Rohrer, vice president of software security at NVIDIA. “Ada and SPARK bring exciting possibilities to address the critical needs of this ecosystem.”

Interest in Ada and SPARK has been on the rise in the automotive space, in addition to the other non-avionic and military spaces that have been the primary areas using these languages. This makes sense, given the level of complexity required for self-driving systems in terms of the amount of code that will be needed to support them.